The Circle of Life (72 = 4 x 18)
The Circle of Life is called in Scripture simply ‘Life’. It consists of everything in Cosmos which is in motion and in a process of refinement. Thus also the human Soul and Body belong to the Circle of Life. To wholly understand the Circle of Life, it is crucial first to understand the following spiritual structure of Cosmos:
Cosmos = the All = The Holy Spirit = The Spirit of Truth + the Circle of Life.
The Cosmos is also called the All, because it is everything – or, more than that: it is everything and nothing. The All is called the highest authority – the Holy Spirit – in Scripture, thus it includes ‘beings’ and ‘non-beings’ all at once. Because the Circle of Life is the things ‘that are, or be’, therefore it is half of the Holy Spirit, or the All.
The Spirit of Truth is also called the Tree of Knowledge, the Absolute Truth etc. in Scripture. For instance, Egyptian mythology used the term Ogdoad for eight deities, who were arranged in four male-female pairs. The four gods represented Primeval Waters (Nu), Eternity and Infinity (Heh), Darkness and Rest (Kuk) and ‘the things without description and shape’ (Amun/Amen). One of these deities, God Nu, had an Ark, and he can be considered the same person as Noah in the Bible. What is more, Nu’s three sons are, of course, Noah’s three sons, whose wives have no names.17 Together, the four of them (Noah and his three boys) symbolize the masculine aspect of the Holy Spirit – the Spirit of Truth. The three boys symbolize also the Way of Truth, where Seem is related to the Baptism of Water, Haam to the Baptism of Fire and Japheth to the Baptism of the Holy Spirit (See Appendix 2, Table 8).
17 The wives of Nu and his three boys have no names, but their names are based on their husbands’ names with a feminine suffix. This explains also why these same wives have no names in Bible.
How could the Circle of Life be defined? One way to think of it is to see it as the absolute opposite of masculinity – the truth (see equation above). In this cycle, 1) Primeval Waters turn into Water of Life, 2) Eternity and Infinity into measurable things (with a beginning and an end), 3) Darkness into Light, together with Rest into Motion, and finally 4) ‘the things without description and shape’ into ‘the things with description and shape’. So, all the things in the All, which belong to any of these four categories, belong to the Circle of Life. This is the simplest description of the Circle of Life, which all human souls are doomed to wander. It is the Soul of all the Souls. Also, in the Ancient Egyptian Divine Order of Creation, the truth, such as Shu, belongs to the spirit and knowledge, while the human soul and body live in the life (Appendix 7).
The physical and geometrical image of the Circle of Life can indeed be described as circle. Because in Hebrew language all the words and letters have their numerical values (Appendix 8), we can actually form the geometric Circle of Life. The Hebrew word for ‘living’ and ‘life’ is חי (chai) with a numerical value of 18. This value is formed with letters het (8) and jod (10), thus 8 + 10 = 18.18 Thus, let us draw a circle with the circumference of 18. This is the Circle of Life. In Gematria, there are words that share the same numerical value and thus are somehow related to each other. That is why e.g. the Circle of Life is connected to the symbol of TeT (9 + 9 = 18), a snake eating its own tale.
18 More on Gematria, a brand of mysticism focused on studying Hebrew numbers and letters see Appendix 9.
In the language of symbolism, every person can be seen as a temple with four cardinal directions. This means that as defined below, the human soul has four aspects and thus four circles of life. This gives us the equation
18 + 18 + 18 + 18 = 72,
and thus it can be said that the number 72 is the number of the human soul. The next question is, whether the soul is formed of four entities, what is the geometric shape of the soul? The answer is located, naturally, in the chest (heart) of Mona Lisa (see Image 19).
The human soul includes four main parts: Memory, Creativity, Reason and Emotion (Appendix 5). Psychology calls Reason the Superego and Emotion the Id (Freud, 1964). In religious texts these four parts are symbolically represented by the Face of God, the four Evangelists, the four sons of Horus, the four Winds of the World, the four cardinal points of the Sky etc. In the Book of Revelation 19:20, John’s testimony of ‘the Beast’ refers to human Emotion, the most primitive and sometimes misleading part in us; ‘the False Prophet’, in turn, is the part which we call Reason – what we have been taught of how the world works and what we have learned to think.
There is an old saying about the eyes being the windows of the soul. These four aspects of the soul - memory, creativity, reason and emotion - can indeed be observed by studying the eye movements. We all draw on these mental resources and our eyes reveal, which part of the brain we use at any given moment.19 This symbol of the Face of God is encoded in the four-fold-flower just above the heart of Mona Lisa.
19 To learn more, see appendixes 5, 6 and 7 together with Neuro-linguistic-programming eye accessing cues (O'Connor, 2001).
